Farewell to Makó Onions

After decades of decline, Hungarian onion production has virtually ceased this year. The popular news site telex.hu quotes János Fekete, president of the National Onion Product Council, as saying in a newspaper interview that while twenty years ago, onion cultivation in the country's most famous onion growing area (the Makó region, SE Hungary), was practiced on 1,500-2,000 hectares, this year only 20-30 hectares of onion area was cultivated in Makó.

The main problem is that Makó's onion production is less and less able to compete with that of Italian, Spanish and German onions, which are much more efficiently produced by those competitors. While onions sown from seed under domestic conditions can produce 250-300 m³ per hectare in Hungary, Italian onions grown under irrigated conditions can reach yields of up to 700-800 m³.

The key word is irrigation, without it, there is nothing to rely on, and drought causes a yield loss of 20-50%. This year, drought has also caused serious losses in Hungary, with some areas in the south of the country losing half the expected quantity. Without the necessary conditions for proper water management, there is no future for Hungarian onions (water management was one of the keys to success for the Italians).

But it is not only Hungarian farmers who are complaining about this year's onion harvest. The drought that has hit Europe as a whole has led to farmers in many places reporting poor onion growth. In Germany, for example, the price of onions in bags was EUR 35-36 per 100 kg in mid-August, much higher than the EUR 25 per 100 kg recorded at this time last year.